Part 10 in the Paris Tribune / Arts Voyager exclusive English-language translation of Michel Ragon’s seminal 1956 novel taking on the world of Abstract art, artists, art collectors, art dealers, and art critics in Paris, as well as post-War anti-Semitism in France. For the first nine parts, click here. For more on Michel Ragon, in French, click here. To learn how to support our work, e-mail artsvoyager@gmail.com . To support us through PayPal, just designate your donation to paulbenitzak@gmail.com .

Fifteen days later, in the throes of correcting the proofs of the second issue, Fontenoy felt a sudden surge of discouragement. Blanche was working in her atelier at the Cité Falguière. He dropped everything and went to see his companion.

Walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse, he took stock of the results of the first issue of the revue. It was too soon to draw any conclusions, but he had the impression of hurtling against a wall. Like Manhès, what had pleased him about this adventure was the battle to come, the possibility of finally saying in print everything he’d been stifling about this conspiracy against the movement of painting that he loved. This revue would be a little bomb which would go off in the midst of the conformists, the cabals. They’d be forced to respond to so many specific accusations. But neither L’Artiste, nor Le Figaro, nor any other newspaper had yet noted, even with two measly lines, the new revue’s existence. Everything continued just as it had been, as if the revue didn’t exist at all. Some booksellers in Montparnasse and Saint-Germain-des-Prés had put it in their windows. Its successful launch depended on them, and on eventual subscriptions in response to the comp. copies that had been sent out.

Blanche was flattened out on her stomach on the divan, working on a water-color. Fontenoy plopped down next to her. In the atelier, numerous water-colors had been framed behind glass, ready for the imminent exhibition.

“You know,” she remarked, continuing to paint, “it’s no laughing-matter to try to get the bookshops to sell the revue….”

“I know. But it’s the only way to spread the word.”

“That’s easy for you to say. You made the rounds of the art bookshops that you know well, and that know you. No problem. You leave the copies on consignment and they say thanks. But me, I hit the other bookshops. You have no idea how they react. Some don’t accept consignments as a matter of sheer principle. They tell me: ‘When you come back to pick up the unsold copies, they’ve disappeared under a pile. They can’t be found and we have to pay you anyway. Two months later they surface and are unsellable. No no, no consignments.’ ‘Okay, so buy a fixed number of issues.’ ‘You must be joking. We’re inundated as it is!’ And those are the nice ones. Others take a quick look, disabusedly shrug their shoulders, and say no. Some pick up the revue, leaf through it, and burst out in guffaws: ‘Ah! Cool, it’s a take-off? I get it — very clever…. But our customers won’t get it at all.’ I was, however, able to place a few copies that were accepted on consignment, begrudgingly, and in those cases most likely because of my gorgeous eyes.”

In a corner of the atelier Fontenoy spotted the pile of rejected revues. He had a sudden spurt of revolt, of anger:

“But how the hell are we supposed to get off the ground if the newspapers give us the silent treatment, if the bookstores refuse consignments, if the subscription drives meet up with nothing but negligence and indifference!?”

Fontenoy perceived that hostility to their cause wasn’t the only factor. The bookstores held themselves above the internecine factional squabbles, but their detached attitude could become just as lethal, if not moreso, as any frontal attacks.

Blanche straightened up her material on the table, cast a last glance at the fresh water-color she’d just finished and came over to sit next to Fontenoy, lacing her plump arms around him.

“Worries, worries, worries! How’s about putting your ‘big ideas’ aside for a moment and getting back to the two of us? Have you finished the preface for my exhibition? What are you planning, for me, in the revue?”

“All that on the other hand is going very well,” Fontenoy responded with lassitude. “Look, I have the text for your preface right here in my pocket. Read through it. For the revue, Rinsbroek will talk about you, it’s preferable.”

“And you won’t put in any of my images?”

“That’ll be up to Rinsbroek.”

“Come again? But what good does it do then to be the editor-in-chief?”

“Rinsbroek wants to talk about you. He’ll say what he judges needs to be said and we’ll publish a reproduction of your work if he considers that you merit it.”

Blanche bit her lip. Fontenoy grasped her tenderly around the waist and kissed her on the temple:

“Listen, Blanche. Don’t get upset. I’m being brutal, but we have much bigger worries these days. Your exhibition will go quite well and in all probability we’ll publish a photo in the revue. Rinsbroek’s article will certainly sing your praises, otherwise he wouldn’t have accepted the assignment. But on principle, I just want to make it clear, once again, that I won’t put any pressure on him. It’s just not comprehensible. It’s as if you’re asking me to employ the very methods in our revue that we’re fighting against when others practice them.”

Blanche didn’t answer. She read over Fontenoy’s handwritten text for the preface:

“How set are you on citing Klee? I know you just mean to use it as a reference, but won’t that just make them think that I imitate him, like all the rest?”

Fontenoy replied, exasperated: “Delete Klee if he bothers you so much!”

Blanche got riled up:

“I like Klee. I don’t deny that. But the reference here just bothers me.”

And she put her dainty little finger on the sheet of paper. “It’s like your phrase: ‘Blanche Favard is an abstract painter who composes with parcels of memory.’ I understand what you’re getting at. My compositions include forms which resemble foliage, even landscapes. I agree. But what will Charles Roy say? The Salon des Réalitiés Nouvelles jury is quite capable of rejecting my submissions under the pretext that they’re Naturalist.”

“So now it’s Charles Roy’s opinion that matters the most to you!?” Fontenoy exclaimed, stupefied.

One of the benefits of the Orsay Museum’s latest penchant for re-envisioning the late 19th-century work which is its charge through the eyes of contemporaneous critics is that the polyglot writers often dictate a polyglot selection of artists which means that major figures overdue for their own solo shows get a cameo. Such is the case with the exceptional Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-1898)’s 1879 oil “Jeunes filles au bord de la mer (Young women at the sea-side),” which features in the work exhibited at the Orsay and theoretically to be exhibited through July 19 at the Strasbourg Museum of Contemporary Art for Huysmans from Degas to Grünewald: As seen by Francesco Vezzoli. Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907) may well have referred to himself as a “Dutchman putrefied with Parisianism,” but if we’re to judge by the Puvis painting above, his tastes were anything but. It’s no surprise that in 1880 — a year after this tableau was made — Emile Zola invited Huysmans to collaborate in the collection “Les Soirées de Medan.” Which connection is enough of a pretense for us to turn the Puvis floor over to the great man, as Zola singled out the painter in his review of the 1875 Salon, published in two “Letters from Paris” which appeared in Le Sémaphore de Marseille of May 3 and 4 and in “Le Messager de l’Europe” in Saint-Petersburg. Today’s translation and art goes out to Holly, and to all the Holly Golightlys of the world, in esperance for the period when we’ll all be able to go lightly again. — PB-I

I’ve saved Puvis de Chavannes’s large tableau for the end. Secluded at the Sainte-Croix convent, Radegonde gives refuge to poets and protects the world of Letters against the epoch’s barbary. Here at last is a truly original talent, who trained himself far from any Academic influences. He alone can succeed in the art of decorative painting, in the vast frescos exposed to the raw light of public institutions. In our times, with the crumbling of classic principles, the fate of mural paintings has become critical. The nobility of heroes, the simplicity of the drawing, every rule which makes the tableau a type of bas-relief in which the ‘cooler’ colors have trouble standing out in the midst of the marble of churches and palaces, have collapsed, making way for the explosion of the romantic brush. And suddenly, it seems to me, Puvis de Chavannes arrives and finds a breach in this impasse. He knows how to be interesting and alive, in simplifying the lines and painting with uniform tones. Radegonde, surrounded by nuns in white gowns, is listening to a poet declaiming verse between the walls of a convent. The scene exudes a grandiose and peaceful charm. To tell the truth, for me Puvis de Chavannes is but a precursor. It is indispensible that large-scale painting is able to find subjects in contemporary life. I don’t know who will be the painter with the genius to know how to extract the art of our civilization, and I don’t know how he’ll do it. But it is indisputable that art does not depend on either draperies or the antique nude; it takes root in humanity itself and consequently every society must have its own conception of beauty.

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Not only did the Surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire review Chagall’s show before it traveled from Paris to Berlin in 1914; his poem “Rotsoge” served as the preface to the exhibition catalog. Our translation of that poem, re-titled “A travers l’Europe” for the poet-critic’s monumental “Calligrammes,” follows the review below. Today’s translations dedicated to my father Ed Winer, who died December 7, 2019 at the age of 81. And to all our valued living elders, because if there’s another reason we’re featuring this painting today, it’s this: Years ago, jogging down to the river from my digs in Fort Worth, Texas, I used to come across a sign on the outskirts of the (private) golf course that bordered the water: “Dr. Dan Patrick, for U.S. Senate.” This week that same Dan Patrick, now lieutenant governor of the Lone Star state, told Fox News (the president’s main information source) that (as Democracy Now reported) maybe all the old people should just let themselves die off, as a sacrifice to the young people so that America can get back to work. Where’s the A.M.A. (American Medical Association, which should sanction Dr. Patrick) when you need it? For more on the exhibition “Chagall, Modigliani, Soutine… Paris pour école, 1905-1940” at the Museum of the Art and History of Judaism in Paris where (in theory) you can see the real McCoy of the Chagall painting, click here .

Marc Chagall

by Guillaume Apollinaire

(From L’Intransigeant, June 4, 1914.)

The Jewish race has not yet shone in the plastic arts. In the modern movement, for example, only Pissarro can be cited as having played an important role among the pioneers of Impressionism.

Being presented at this moment at the Sturm gallery in Berlin, which has exposed a large number of the young French painters and particularly [Robert] Delaunay and Léger, is the work of a young Russian Israelite painter, Marc Chagall. To this information I’d like to add that one can see his paintings in Paris at the Malpel gallery on the rue Montaigne.

Chagall is a colorist full of an imagination which, sometimes springing from the fantasies of Slavic folk imagery, always surpasses it.

He’s an extremely varied artist, capable of monument-scale paintings, and he doesn’t let any system cage him.

His show, which I caught before it travelled to Germany, includes 34 oils, water-colors, and drawings from different periods. I prefer his more recent work and above all his “Paris as seen from the window.”

Collected in Guillaume Apollinaire, “Chroniques d’Art” (1902-1918), copyright 1960 Librairie Gallimard and compiled and annotated by L.-C. Breunig. Including the lead to the poem below which served as preface to the Chagall exhibition catalog.

****

A travers l’Europe

by Guillaume Apollinaire

To M. Ch.

Rotsoge
Your scarlet visage your biplane metamorphosed into a hydroplane
Your circular house where a pickled herring swims.
I must have the key to the eyelids
Happily we spotted M. Panado
And we’re assured on that account
What do you see my dear M.D….
90 or 324 a man in the air a veal who sees through her mother’s stomach.

I’ve looked for so long on the roads
So many eyes are shut along the roads
The wind makes willow-groves cry
Open open open open open
Look oh just look therefore
The old are bathing their feet in the wash-basin
Una volta ho intesto dire Chè vuoi
I burst into tears at the memory of your childhoods

And you you show me a harrowing violet
This little painting where there’s a car reminds me of the day
A day made up of mauve morsels yellows blues greens and reds
Where I went to the country with a charming chimney holding its dog by the leash
It’s gone it’s gone your little reed-pipe
Far from me the chimney smokes Russian cigarettes
The dog barks at the lilacs
The night-light has petered out
Petals have shat on the gown
Two golden rings next to the sandals
have lit up on the Sun
But your hair is the trolley
riding through Europe dressed with little multi-colored lights.

From “Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916),” copyright Librairie Gallimard 1925 and Club du meilleur livre 1955.